This is great!
The " INTERNATIONAL CLOUD-ATLAS PUBLISHED BY ORDER OF THE COMMITTEE" you linked is gorgeous.
Also amazing to see so many names known from other branches of science got involved - John Dalton, one of the founders of chemistry, James Huttonthe founder of geology .
Shows how specialised the sciences have had to become I suppose.

I'll throw in my favorite image of "how many great waters fell from heaven" by Albrecht Dürer. Not scientific at all though.posted by thatwhichfalls at 10:11 PM on March 23, 2005

And, halcyon_daze, I was delighted to learn from your first link that Jean-Baptiste Lamarck actually beat Luke Howard to the punch and was the first to publish a cloud classification scheme, which lost out because 1) it used French instead of Latin and 2) it appeared "in the same publication (Annuaire Méteorologique) as forecasts based on astrological data." The more I learn about Lamarck, the more I like him.posted by mediareport at 9:51 PM on March 24, 2005

I am thereby forced to concede, then, that whenever one is considering the invention of a new form of scientific nomenclature, one must keep in mind that locution is everything.

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